


Love Notes: Heliocentric

by aquabelacqua



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Awkward Flirting, Falling In Love, Flirting, Johnlock Fluff, Johnlock Roulette, Love, M/M, Mixtape, Music Creation, POV Sherlock Holmes, Secret Crush, Sherlock Loves John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 17:48:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4358507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquabelacqua/pseuds/aquabelacqua
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes has never written a love note before. He’s never tucked a folded bit of paper, worn at the edges and grimy with nervous perspiration, into an outstretched hand. He has no experience with courtship of any kind, let alone an overt declaration of sentiment, and yet he knows, somehow, that’s exactly what this is—avowal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love Notes: Heliocentric

Sherlock Holmes resists the urge to lean forward and rest his elbows on his knees, even though, after an hour, his steepled fingers are starting to fall asleep. If he stops to shake them out, to restore the blood flow to his extremities, he might forget what comes after track four. And track four is important—it’s essential.

_It connects the red planet to the king of the gods._

Sherlock grimaces and shakes his head. An imperfect metaphor, perhaps, but he is unused to dealing in metaphor. It’s too fluid, too imprecise. Facts, observations, deductions—these are his currency. But now he must acknowledge that his current task is one that eschews precision. It requires subtlety, some acknowledgment of a grey area. Perhaps—and here he whips a hand out sideways, dismissing the idea the moment he considers it—perhaps even _sentiment_. 

Also, it has taken him nearly an hour just to determine the essentialness of track four, so Sherlock stays upright, fingertips grazing the underside of his nose, and breathes into the problem.

 _Problem? Is it a problem? Yes, of course it’s a problem._ Focus.

The stereo had been Mycroft’s once, but Sherlock tries not to hold that against it. He simply admires its sleek lines and minimalist functions, the way the sound system hums quietly when performing a task and stays silent when idle, a keeper of secrets. It is a marvel, tainted only by the fact that his brother’s spidery fingers once twisted its smooth knobs to manipulate sound, much the way he does now with the flow of information throughout Britain.

Sherlock shifts to relieve the pressure of the floor against his backside and uncrosses his long legs, careful not to topple the stacks of CDs, records, and cassettes crowded around him. He rolls each ankle, loosening the joints and wincing when his bones crack and pop, before re-crossing his legs in the opposite formation.

He’s spent months collecting the necessary data, weeks determining the optimal day for working without fear of interruption, three nights detailing the first draft of a playlist, and now—well, he refuses to be thwarted by _metaphor_.

 _Focus,_ he thinks again.

Foremost is the consideration of how much music will fit onto a disc, as he has neither the time nor the stomach for a longer project. Sherlock had considered creating a digital mix, obviously, but as John leans toward the nostalgic—and here, Sherlock cannot suppress an eyeroll—he knows that John would prefer a disc to a series of files, the concrete winning out over the ephemeral. (And Sherlock absolutely draws the line at creating a cassette. Decisions about song order and which tracks should appear on which side would likely kill him—or at least send him diving for the emergency pack of cigarettes he’d secreted away in a hollowed-out copy of The Effects of Cross and Self Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom.)

Sherlock surveys the choices before him. It is… _possible_ that he has more data than is strictly necessary. His eyelids flutter while he considers that prospect. Typically, he finds the narrowing-down process quickens with a surfeit of information, but in this particular case, each component seems to take the experiment in a different direction, moving him farther away from the original design.

He scans the stacks he’s made of John’s music, arranged into neat piles according to specific criteria—scratches on the vinyl, fingerprints on the plastic cases, whether the album was purchased new or secondhand, how many copies were sold in the first week of release, relative attractiveness of band members, electric versus acoustic instruments, whether or not the liner notes are intact, wear and tear around the center hole of the record, if there are multiple formats of the same album in the collection, and whether or not the album is a foreign edition.

Yes, if he can take this data, cross-reference it against the chart he’s created—

“For fuck’s sake, Sherlock.”

Sherlock hears John’s voice in his head as if his flatmate is standing right behind him, and he jumps.

“I’m not _that_ difficult to deduce.”

Sherlock can almost _see_ him there, head cocked to one side, barely controlling an incredulous grin, caught between calling him “brilliant” and, likely, “a giant tit.”

Sherlock is used to speaking for hours without John responding (perhaps, John might argue, that’s because he’s not often present at the time). However, he finds the opposite, rarer scenario—being spoken to by an illusory John Watson—unnerving. Although, even absent, John may have a point.

Sherlock tucks his legs closer to his body, fingers gliding down to rub his aching knee joints, and considers John’s ( _imaginary_ ) words carefully.

He disagrees to some extent—John Watson is not entirely uncomplicated—but perhaps Sherlock is obfuscating the process overmuch. He’s been focused on connecting melody to metaphor, on finding songs that fit a strict schema. Songs with “stars” in the title, songs about Earth and about Saturn, about gravity and orbits and constellations. But maybe even _that’s_ too mechanical, too unfeeling. Sherlock frowns. Could his experiment be better served by a different sort of reasoning? Would that lead to clearer results? He narrows his eyes at the controlled clutter surrounding him.

After a long moment, he reaches out a fingertip and topples the closest pile. Plastic cases and cardboard covers waterfall into chaos, and something gives way in Sherlock’s chest. He leans forward, pushing over stacks, undoing weeks of careful collecting. Then, kneeling in front of the avalanche of music, he shuffles the piles with his palms, CD cases shifting under album covers, an incongruous rainbow of genres, media, and eras fanned out before him.

He sits back on his heels and closes his eyes, willing himself to think, to look for the less obvious, to find the negative space. The crackle of vinyl between songs before the needle is lifted. The singer’s intake of breath before the first word is sung. That which signifies rather than manifests.

Not “this is” but “what if?”

Sherlock Holmes has never written a love note before. He’s never tucked a folded bit of paper, worn at the edges and grimy with nervous perspiration, into an outstretched hand. He has no experience with courtship of any kind, let alone an overt declaration of sentiment, and yet he knows, somehow, that’s exactly what this is—avowal.

_But where to start? With the pointed? The poignant? The mundane? Think. THINK!_

His schema—the sun, the planets, their moons, a handful of stars. Thus, eighteen, possibly twenty songs, each connected to a bit of brightness, a swirl of life. Some pulsing and vibrant with reflected light, some distant, dark, and icy. All linked back to the absolute center of gravity, the beginning and end of the galaxy. His galaxy.

He open his eyes, pushes through the piles with spread-apart fingers, trying to touch all the covers at once, as if the tactile alone will be enough to guide him. The images are a blur, the chatter and slide of cardboard and plastic against the thinning pile of carpet anything but a soothing melody. He draws his attention inward, looking for a hook, an obvious opening point, a _way in_.

_Start somewhere. Start at the start, with the sun. What is it?_

_The largest object in the solar system—No, NO! Don’t be obvious. Think around it. Think in_ orbit _. What. Is. The. Sun._

_(Golden light, warmth, the inexorable pull of life)_

_Oh._ Sherlock’s eyes fly open. _And?_

_(Blonde eyelashes whispering shadows across pale skin, silver-light hair cropped short, downy soft)_

_Interesting._

_(The feel of that heat against cheeks and mouth and hands. The all-consuming start and end of everything)_

Sherlock lets out a slow breath, unsteady but focused. He lays his hands on top of the pile, trails his fingers gently across the surfaces of the albums, feeling the tips bump and drag against angled edges and smooth planes. He pulls out a CD, the first that feels…. right… and sits back on his heels again, flipping the case over to read the song titles.

A slow smile steals across his face.

**********

At half-four, everything is stored out of sight, and Sherlock is rinsing the last of the ink stains from his fingers, while pointedly ignoring the dishes in the kitchen sink, when John bustles in. He’s animated, already talking while removing his coat and nudging the door closed with his foot.  Sherlock skims John’s words, identifying the upbeat tempo and quick phrasing as evidence that he’s had good day at the clinic. Even John’s grousing about working through lunch sounds jovial, conversational. A happy concurrence.

Sherlock is drying his fingers one by one on a dish towel when the sound of John’s movements from the next room halt altogether and his voice drifts in through the open door.

“Sherlock? What’s this?”

Sherlock doesn’t respond. When he bunches up the thin edge of the towel, he can dry the tricky bits under his fingernails. John is closer now. His voice rises up at the ends of his sentences.

“Did this come in the post? Have you been you opening my mail again?”

The hint of accusation in John’s voice forces Sherlock to turn his head away further, to conceal his smile before whirling around, composed.

“You’ll be on your own for dinner tonight,” Sherlock says crisply. “I’ve had a text from Molly at the morgue.”

With that, Sherlock slips by him, barely glancing down to see John running his thumb over the CD cover in amazement. Gold constellations winking out against a midnight sky and the title, in Sherlock’s handwriting, so damning, so _obvious_ :

_A Little Knowledge of the Solar System_

**********

Sherlock is gratified he’s had the foresight to lay his outerwear on his bed, giving himself the span of several breaths to arrange his features into a familiar combination of detachment and boredom.

He’s not entirely surprised that John hasn’t followed him down the hall. For all that they live practically on top of one another, books and equipment and tea things overlapping and intermingling, they’ve each managed to respect the sanctity of the other’s bedroom. Odd.

Sherlock cannot count the number of times he’s barged in on John in the bathroom, sticking his head into a cloud of steam and shouting at John to hurry, to turn off the shower and follow him down the rabbit hole again, but—and this aches in a manner he won’t acknowledge—he has to rely on his mind palace to envision John’s pillow.  Sherlock allows himself a moment to picture the indentation from John’s skull, a shadowy dip in the striped cotton, before glancing over his shoulder.

Through his open bedroom door, he can see John at the opposite end of the flat, sitting at their shared work table. His shoulders are hunched up around ears that are fitted with cushy, oversized headphones, the blue light from his laptop illuminating his work-worn, lovely face. John’s fingers are pressed firmly against his mouth, obscuring it completely, and his eyes are shut, his brows drawn together in concentration.

Sherlock swallows hard, looking away. He busies himself, swirling his coat around his shoulders and fumbling the knot to his scarf. Taking a breath, he pulls energy into his limbs and storms across the flat as if he’s _leaving, late, can’t stop, very busy._ When he reaches the door to their flat, he lays his gloved hand on the doorknob but doesn’t twist it, not yet. Sherlock cannot resist looking back once again. The sun’s gravity is too strong, always.

John is watching him—staring at him, really—his eyes wide, eyebrows raised and questioning, his mouth still hidden by his fingers. Sherlock’s knees turn to water. Slowly, John shakes his head.

 _Right_ , Sherlock thinks, _of course_ , and turns the knob and yanks the door open, desperate to flee the embarrassment and disappointment that explodes inside him like a supernova.

Sherlock had always imagined his heart was a stone, but he was so, so wrong. _Human error_. Sherlock’s heart is glass, shattering instantly. He wants _to want_ to apologize but he can’t. His chest is too full of glittering, sorrowing shards to feel contrite and _God, NOW the metaphors are flowing smoothly?_ Instead, he shrugs helplessly, silently pleading with John to forget all this, to forget everything so they can go back to before.

But then John’s hand drops from his mouth, and he’s smiling. Shaking his head, yes, but in astonishment, incredulity, not dissent. John’s eyes are as blue and shimmering as twin moons, his face wide open. He looks—

 _Hopeful,_ Sherlock thinks, _oh_ , and ducks his head quickly to hide his answering smile, regret released so quickly he feels lightheaded and has to grip the doorknob tightly to keep vertical.

When he looks back up at John again a moment later—calmer, collected—he nods once, and before he can say anything at all, before he can ruin it, he closes the door behind him and clatters his way downstairs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Seriously, this is the most fun you can have have with your pants on. 
> 
> Please feel free drop me a line if you loved it, liked it, felt something rise in your chest while you read it (happiness? Bile? Indigestion?), or if you just want to talk about what Sherlock Holmes would painstakingly choose to put on a mix CD for his beloved blogger. I love comments.
> 
> I also love that you took the time to read this--it means the world to me. 
> 
> (ETA - I am aquabelacqua on Tumblr. Just sayin' :::shy toe-shuffle:::)
> 
> (And of COURSE there is an actual mix - it's a bit not good, totally lopsided, maybe even a bit mad. I like to think Sherlock threw out his very literal playlist and just went for full-on mix tape flirtation with this, in proper 80s kid style. Listen here: [A Little Knowledge of the Solar System](https://play.spotify.com/user/aquabelacqua/playlist/2ukRBAW3UXZDbgVAHmffqc)
> 
> ETA: a lovely reader reminded me that non-users of Spotify cannot see or play Spotify mixes (boo!) so I made an 8tracks version as well. Listen here: [A Little Knowledge of the Solar System](http://8tracks.com/aquabelacqua/a-little-knowledge-of-the-solar-system-1))
> 
> BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! The incredible [sweet little kitty](http://sweetlittlekitty.tumblr.com/post/128853908128/falling-in-love-commissioned-by-aquabelacqua) created a breathtaking work of art based on this fic, a sort of "what happened next" imagining that just blew my socks off. Check it out here: [Falling in love](http://aquabelacqua.tumblr.com/post/128897462820/sweetlittlekitty-falling-in-love) UHHHHH-mazing! ❤️


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